Soar: Impasse Driven Processing

Description

• Soar's decision cycle creates emergent goal-directed behavior.
• When Soar does not have sufficient knowledge to choose a context object, an impasse arises, and the agent creates a goal to resolve the impasse
• With each new (sub)goal, a new problem space is selected within which the agent attempts to resolve the impasse
• Actions in the new problem space may
  • Reach yet another impasse, in which case a new problem space is selected wherein the new impasse may be resolved
  • Satisfy the subgoal, in which case the agent reverts to the previous problem space and continues towards satisfying the previous goal
  • Retrieve new information which makes the entire subgoal itself irrelevant, in which case the subgoal disappears and the agent continues in the previous problem space
• As a subgoal is satisified, a chunk is formed which reflects the process through which the associated impasse was resolved; thus, the next time the same situation occurs, there will be no impasse, since the newly created chunk contains sufficient knowledge for Soar to continue